Planning

This however is not something you can dream up and create in an evening and hope it will spread virally. You need to plan it carefully. Renier discussed defining goals and strategy for you viral competition in our previous blog post. I would like to delve a bit deeper and help you plan how you will reach those goals.

Defining your audience

Now that you have decided on your goals and the strategy you will be following. To reach these you will need to define your audience. You need to define who you will need to reach so your competition will fulfil your goals? Who are the market leaders and evangelists of your audience?  It’s important that you know exactly what the profile of your audience will be to enable you to target them in the best manner you can.

How to reach your audience

Now that you have defined your audience you need to investigate what channels you will use to reach them. If you where looking at targeting business owners and professionals the channels you use would be completely different from targeting a young professional. Knowing your audience you need to determine which channels online will work the best to target these users. Quite frequently email has been used as the first point of departure with campaigns like these but because of excessive use it has also started losing some of it’s effectiveness. Targeting users on social mediums have become quite a big channel because of the ease of sharing this with their friends.

Tailoring the competition

Your competition will also need to be tailored for your audience. If you are targeting web savvy users then you can add more complex steps to the competition. If your audience however were not power users then it would be beneficial for you if you keep your competition as simple as possible. This isn’t the only factor you should look at though; you will need to look at everything from the design to the language you use to ensure your audience associate with it.

Keeping it alive

Now initially your competition might get a lot of traffic because of all the other marketing initiatives you are running to promote the competition but after that it’s up to you to keep it alive. You will need to plan exactly what steps you need to take to make sure users keep sharing and spreading the word. This could include emailing them reminders, offering another price for the top sharer whatever will appeal to your users and keep it going. You also need to monitor the campaign closely and ensure you can adapt approaches if you see that another approach you didn’t think is having a viral effect.

A viral competition is a very sensitive environment and you really need to plan all your steps carefully otherwise your competition might never take flight and your goals won’t be met. If you have your planning well defined and thought through and you are able to adapt your approach, you should find that your competition should prove to be a very good marketing tool.

Please leave your comments or questions below.

There are a lot of competitions available each day online and it is easy to run one for your own company but it might not necessarily be a great success. You need to make sure to plan your competition well before you launch it to make sure that you get the desired response, feedback and success.

Goals

The first thing that you must do is to make a list of goals for the competition. For each competition that you run you must have a reason why you are running it and certain objectives that you would like to accomplish. Whether your goal is to gain more followers on your social media channels or to promote a new product or service, without goals your competition and the results you get from it will be meaningless.

Strategy

After defining your goals you will need a strategy to accomplish your goals. You need to get a decent prize, something that people want, you must make it worth it for them to enter in your competition. The bigger and beter the reward is the beter your response will be. You will definitely also have to market your competition, otherwise no one will know about it. Make sure that you plan your strategy for each of your channels of advertising. Later this week we will discuss different ways to help promote your online competition, such as PPC, SEO and Social media. We will also discuss ways to optimize your website that will make it easier for the participants to achieve the desired goals on the website, eg newsletter signup or following your Social pages.

Measurement

Make sure to implement all the necessary tracking methods to measure the success of your competition through all your advertising channels. Whether your competition is a success or not, it would be a good idea to measure the performance in order to ascertain what you did wrong or right, so that you can optimize it for your next run.

By having these points in place you will be on your way to running a good online competition, check back the rest of this week to get more information on making sure people know about your competition and getting your website ready for it.